Chris Prather
- Street: 4109 Woodlynne Lane, Orlando FL 32812
- Phone: 407.414.4784
- Email: chris@prather.org
- Github: http://github.com/perigrin
Work Experience
PRL/Opentrons - New York NY (remote) (500+ employees)
PRL/Opentrons is a fast growing startup in the healthcare industry.
Director of Software - 03/28/2021 - Preset - 40 hours / week
Lead Software Engineer - 6/2021 - 03/23/2021 - 40 hours / week
Senior Software Engineer - 4/2021 - 06/2021 - 40 hours / week
The Software department at PRL is responsible for all in-house developed
software, including our custom Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS),
Client Portal, and Electronic Lab Reporting.
Duties and Responsbilities
I participated in and oversaw the Software department as it grew from a single
team of 5 people to several functional working groups of 2 engineering
managers and 17 developers.
Attention to Detail
- Worked directly to improve our deployment process to be repeatable and
transitioned from a responsibility of the senior engineers to the on-call
engineer.
- Established and championed an RFC process to document large scale technical
decisions and department level policies
- Worked with external vendors and our Tech Lead to transition our diagnosis
reporting from sFTP to HTTP
Customer Service
- Worked with leadership in other departments to coordinate deliverables from
software on projects ranging from a high throughput Next Generation Sequencing
(NGS) workflow, to new diagnostic tests, to in-lab automation.
- Developed and documented (as an RFC) our career ladder for the Software
department
- Developed and revised based on team feedback a hiring loop that focused on
minimizing the impact on both candidates and team members while getting the
best signals for suitability
Oral Communication
- Participated in weekly meetings providing updates to senior management on the
timelines for our projects.
- Had regular 1:1s with my direct reports and eventually my skip-level reports,
as well as our relevant partners in Product and the PMO
- Developed and mentored the engineering managers on the HR guided annual
performance review process
Problem Solving
- Lead a process to migrate the department from a traditional team
structure to ad-hoc feature teams/working groups
- Worked with Product and the PMO to build and agile development cycle that
focused on making sure the right people had the right conversations at the
right time
- Identified the need and successfully participated in the hiring process for a
VP of Engineering for PRL
- Identified, planned, and executed with HR a hiring roadmap
Joyent - San Francisco CA (Remote) (100 Employees)
Joyent is a subsidary of Samsung Electronics specializing in Cloud Computing.
Cloud Deployment Engineer - 06/2018 to 4/2021 - 40 hours / week
The cloud deployment team is responsible for the preflight configuration and
validation of machines before they were released for production use in our
cloud services environment.
Duties and Responsbilities
Initially I maintained the UI/UX our build validation system Conch. Worked with
the team lead to identify, interview and hire a new developer to take over the
maintenance of the UI/UX component. I worked on several projects related to build
automation, including proof of concept for a Data Center Inventory Management
system. I took over the build operations platform and duties.
Attention to Detail
- Started transitioning preflight workflow tools to Go from Perl + Shell to improve
maintainability by the larger team.
- Assisted in or Performed build operations tasks for several expansions,
requiring monitoring dozens of machines at various stages of the build process.
- Rebuilt preflight operations infrastructure migrating migrating it to
Ansible, a configuration management tool, for consistent and maintainble
deployment.
- Documented of preflight operations workflows, preflight
infrastructure, and software components.
Customer Service
- Took over hands-on build preflight operations for preparing new machines for the
production environment. This required working with the expansion Project
Manager to maintain the schedule of releases. And working with the Datacenter
and Network Operations staff to diagnose and resolve hardware and software
configuration failures on machines during validation.
Oral Communication
- Identified, interviewed, and reccomended for hire a new front end developer
for conch-ui and maintain.
- Gave presentations on the current state and future direction for build
operations infrastructure.
Problem Solving
- Maintained conch-ui application written in mithril.js until a new
version in Vue.js could be developed and released.
- Wrote proof of concept Bill of Material/Datacenter Inventory Manamgnet application
Conch-Locker using Perl’s Mojoliicous::Lite and Postgres.
- Learned Go to take over maintenance and development of conch-shell and
kosh the command line (CLI) clients for the Conch API.
stakeholders and co-workers on the infrastructure and architecture.
- Rewote preflight Firmware Agent from legacy Shell (bash)
scripts to modern Go architecture.
Tamarou LLC - Orlando FL (3 Employee)
Tamarou is a consulting company specializing in primarily web applications with
a focus in Perl. The “miracles of ingenuity” that comes with advanced
technology should be used to minimize the time spent in unattractive labor,
software developers should be craftsman who take pleasure in their work produce
things that are pleasing to their customers.
Managing Partner - 10/2008 to 06/2018 - 40 hours / week
Duties and Responsibilities
Managed administrative, business, and legal aspects of this consulting company
including finding new contracts, tracking invioces, and work assignments.
Attention to Detail
- Handled the administrative, business, and legal aspects for the company for 10 years.
- Build a testable infrastructure deployment using Ansible.
- Implemented a combat system for a turn based online MMORPG written
in Perl.
Customer Service
- Identified recruited, and mainted new customers and employees.
- Managed the team re-developing the content managent application for an
Alexa Top 100 video on demand website using Perl’s Catalyst (comparable
to Ruby on Rails) and MySQL.
Oral Communication
- Happy Campers: Lessons Learned From Scouting’s Premiere Leadership Course
(scheduled) 06/2019 The Perl Conference - Pittsburgh, PA
- I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like: How Congitive Linguistics Makes You a More
Badass Programmer (scheduled) 08/2016 South East Linux Fest - Charolette, NC
- The Secret Diary of a Small Perl Shop (scheduled) 06/2012 Yet Another Perl
Conference North America - Madison, WI
Problem Solving
- Designed several REST APIs using JSON, Perl, Postgres and MySQL.
- Designed a realtime sales fufillment engine, identified that the current system’s
failure to scale was it’s syncrhonous nature. Researched message passing systems
(0mq, Kafka, NSQ etc.) ended up using Rabbit MQ. Wrote the initial version of the
Crixa Perl module to better fit with the RabbitMQ development style.
Callsheet LLC - Los Angeles, CA (Remote) (3 employees)
Callsheet produces next generation filmmaking pre-production software.
Founder - 08/2011 to 06/2018 - 10 hours / week
Handled the administrative, business, and legal aspects of this early stage
startup. Assisted with architecture and design for both the REST API, and
EmberJS based UI.
HD Publishing Group, Development Team - Lake Mary FL (50 employees)
An internet marketing and data aggregation company that develops services to
provide the public with access to information in a consumer-friendly manner.
Programmer - 10/2008 to 08/2009 - 40 hours / week
Made significant changes to the order processing system, reducing code
duplication and adding more verification of user entered data. Added a system
to track updates to customer billing accounts and update internal records so
that automatic re-billing would work seamlessly. Helped implement integration
with a third party credit card verification system. Built an on-deman reporting
system to perform business intelligence queries for Marketting and Upper
Managment. Researched developing a graph oriented data-store linking
potentially hundreds of millions of records based on latent semantic criteria.
Introduced modern Perl frameworks such as Moose, and DBIx::Class into the
development process, and migrated the code source control system from
Subversion to Git. I assisted developers on getting up to speed with the new
systems and technology.
Infinity Interactive - Manhasset, NY (Remote) (8 Employees)
We’re not your typical dev shop; not your typical IT consulting firm. We’ve
been here since 1998—before the “dot-com” boom (the first one) and long enough
to maybe even have a little grey in our hair. You can’t come to our office,
because we don’t have an office.
Software Developer - 03/2007 to 10/2008 - 40 hours / week
Worked on large Catalyst and DBIx::Class based websites, and developed backend
applications for offline processing using Moose and POE.
Reuters, Fixed Income Pricing - St. Paul MN (5000 Employees)
The Fixed Income Pricing Group at Reuters was responsible for the pricing data
for all the Fixed Income (Bonds, CMOs, etc) products that Reuters tracked
professionally.
Software Engineer — 04/2004 to 03/2007 - 40 hours / week
Designed and built a web application to allow the Pricing Desk analysts control
over Money Market instrument pricing, and web application to allow data
analysts access to quality assurance tools for Real Time Composite Pricing.
Helped architect and implement the Real Time Composite Pricing cycle
infrastructure. Built an application for real time TBA mortgage pricing, and
designed several other web based utilities for the Pricing Desk analysts to
control the daily pricing cycles.
Bespoke software consultancy specializing in web delivered applications.
Software Developer - 12/2001 to 08/2003 - 40 hours / week
Designed and implemented a multi-tiered Apache/mod_perl + SOAP application, and
implemented SoqL OO Relational Database language (atop MySQL 3.23). I presented
a talk about SoqL at YAPC::EU 2003. Administered several Linux (Gentoo, RH 7.x)
boxes running Apache/mod_perl & MySQL platforms. Designed and Implemented a
large scale SQL Server 2000 Database for a Continuing Professional Development
Management system.
Volunteer Experience & Causes
CPAN (Comprehensive Perl Archive Network)
The Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) is a repository of over 250,000
software modules and accompanying documentation for 39,000 distributions,
written in the Perl programming language by over 12,000 contributors.
Module Author - 04/2003 – Present
- https://metacpan.org/author/PERIGRIN
- One of the core maintainers for Moose, mostly responsible for
oose.pm which
allows you to write single line scripts on the command line easier.
- Created
Task::Kensho primarily to stop Matt Trout’s whinging about a
kitchen sink included distribution for Perl.
- Worked with the current and original maintainers of
Net::Twitter during the
re-design and port to Moose.
Troop 23, 42 and Pack 42 - Orlando Florida
Boy Scouts of America Units in Orlando Florida
Assistant Scout Master Troop 23 and 42 - 02/2018 to Present
- Founding Assistant Scoutmaster for Troop 42 (Girls)
- Training Introduction to Outdoor Leadership Skills
Cubmaster - 02/2013 to 02/2019
- Woodbadge (S4-83-14-2 Antelope)
- Managed transition to Co-Ed Pack
Yet Another Perl Conference (YAPC)
Lead Conference Organizer
Yet Another Perl Conference, usually given as the abbreviation YAPC, is a
series of conferences discussing the Perl programming language, usually
organized under the auspices of The Perl Foundation and Yet Another Society, a
“non-profit corporation for the advancement of collaborative efforts in
computer and information sciences”.
- YAPC::NA 2014 (Orlando, FL) - 300 attendees
- YAPC::NA 2011 (Asheville, NC) - 400 attendees
irc.perl.org
irc.perl.org is collection of IRC servers run by various members of the Perl
community. It is home to hundreds of perl projects, modules and social
channels. It is also home to a lot of not-perl projects and the like.
IRC Operator - January 2013 - Present
- Maintain a node on the IRC network, work as a network administrator (Oper)
and act as a community liason.
Education
BA, English: Technical Communication 2001 — University of Central Florida
Honors & Awards
White Camel Award 2015 - The Perl Foundation
“Chris Prather, also known as perigrin, has been a tireless community leader
for the Orlando Perl mongers and a conference organizer for Perl Oasis,
YAPC::NA 2011 in Ashville, and YAPC::NA 2014 in Orlando.” - brain d foy